• DFG project “The populist challenge in parliament” (2019-2021, in cooperation with Christian Stecker, Marcel Lewandowsky, Jochen Müller)

• PolMine Project:
  • long history of experiments with cooccurrence graphs and graph visualisation
  • long history of difficulties to make sense of this analytical approach (derived from corpus linguistics) from the point of view of social science methodology
  • graph annotation widget (gradget) as a recent development: New workflow that combines qualitative and quantitative exploration of cooccurrence graphs

• Substantial interest: Data-driven (but conceptually guided) reconstruction of AfD ideology.

• Methodological interest:
  • Validity and intersubjectivity of data-driven, “distant reading” approaches (Moretti 2013)
  • Special focus: Interactive graph annotation as an approach to generate intersubjectively shared interpretations/understandings of discourse patterns.

• anlysing ideolgies as the relational analysis of concepts:
  “[…] ideologies are configurations of political concepts - such as liberty, democracy, justice, and nationhood - in which particular interpretations of each constituent concept have been selected out of an indeterminate range of meanings they may signify.” (Freeden 1998, 748)

• Mudde’s definition of populism:
  “I define populism as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expres- sion of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” (Mudde 2004, 543)

• referring to Freeden, Mudde sees populism as “thin-centered ideology” (Mudde 2004, 544)

• cognitive-affective mapping as a recent approaches to analyse the relational nature of ideologies (Thomas Homer-Dixon 2013; Thomas Homer-Dixon and Thagard 2014)

• “end of ideology” (Bell 1960), “catch-all party” (Kirchheimer, n.d.), but persistent tradition to align parties with ideologies (such as conservatism, socialism, green political thought, liberalism)

• perils of ascribing (thin) populist ideology to AfD:
  • AfD not to be classified as populist a priori
  • this is a matter of empirical research!
• change within and beyond populism
  • possibility that AfD may enter a post-populist stage, and turns into a conservative, or nationalist party (parliamentarian transformation of AfD)
  • even if AfD is populist, alignments of populism with other ideologies, varieties of populism

• requirement to have a research instrument to empirically reconstruct the ideology of AfD, including the potential internal variation if ideology

• Q: Persistence of populist traits of AfD in parliament, (variation of) ideological alignments of AfD.

• corpora of parliamentary debates as hallmark of the PolMine Project: GermaParl

• The following analysis is based on the MigTex corpus:
  • The corpus has been prepared in the MigTex Project (“Textressourcen für die Migrations- und Integrationsforschung”, funding: BMFSFJ)
  • Preparation of all plenary debates in Germany’s regional parliaments (2000-2018) using the “Framework for Parsing Plenary Protocols” (frappp-package)
  • Extraction of a thematic subcorpus using unsupervised learning (topic modelling)

• Size of the MigParl corpus:
  27241205 tokens

• size without interjections and presidency:
  22837376

• MigParl corpus used as “proof of concept” - FedParl corpus (all debates in regional parliaments) to be used for the “real” / “full” analysis

kwic("GERMAPARL", query = "Islam", positivelist = c(good, bad)) %>%
  highlight(lightgreen = good, orange = bad) %>%
  tooltips(setNames(sentiws[["word"]], sentiws[["weight"]])) %>%
  knit_print()

• ‘gradgets’ as a tool to map ideology in an empirical, data-driven, interactive procedure

• Using three-dimensional visualisations:
  • you can turn the visualisation in three-dimensional space
  • you can click on the edges and nodes, get the concordances that are behind the statistical evaluation, and leave an annotation.

• In a real-world workflow, the result of the graph annotation exercise can be stored and put into an online appendix to a publication that explains interpretative results.

• Three gradgets:
  • threedimensional, anaglyph gradget, restrictive filtering
  • threedimensional, anaglyph gradget
  • threedimensional, plain gradget, annotation

The results of this research are very preliminary:

• (somewhat surprising) explicit politeness of AfD speakers.

• It’s the economy: Introducing a redistributive logic as a leitmotiv.

• There is no autism at all! But a lot of interaction with other parties (and visitors!).

• Cultivating antagonisms: “Wir” (AfD / AfD-Fraktion) and the others.

• It’s the economy: Introducing a redistributive logic as a leitmotiv.

But in a way, AfD speeches served only as a case how we might develop the idea of “visual hermeneutics” (Schaal, Kath, and Dumm 2016): If we decide to work with cooccurrence graphs, graph annotation is the approach suggested here to realise the idea of distant and close reading, and to achieve intersubjectivity.